Protect Whistleblowers

San Francisco, 5th December 2013. The US Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) has launched a crowd-funding campaign to develop open-source encryption tools that are designed to make communications between journalists and sources more secure.

The move is a direct result of the recent NSA revelations and the US government’s unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. In its first year, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) crowd-funded over US$ 480,000 that went directly to cutting-edge journalism focused on transparency and accountability.

“Protecting the digital communications of journalists is turning into the press-freedom fight of the 21st Century,” said Freedom of the Press Foundation executive director Trevor Timm. “The Obama administration has been able to prosecute a record number of whistleblowers largely by subpoenaing emails and phone calls. It’s clear that journalists can’t protect their own sources by just refusing to testify anymore, so we need tools that will help them.”

The two-month long campaign will support projects by proven security experts, who are working on making end-to-end encryption easier for phone calls, texts, instant messages, emails, and browsing the web. The projects are all open-source and free to use.